The Wrocław University of Science and Technology has signed a Letter of Intent (LOI) with a local heat and power plant operator to use waste heat from its data center to power a district heating network in Wrocław, western Poland.Heat rising from the servers in the Wrocław Centre for Networking and Supercomputing will be siphoned into the nearby city to warm homes and businesses. No information was released about the estimated completion date for the project or its cost.DCD has approached Wrocław University of Science and Technology for comment.“The energy transition requires not only the development of new, efficient energy sources, but also the utilization of energy already generated in various sectors of the economy,” said Dariusz Witkowski, the chief executive of Kogeneracja, a combined heat and power plant in Wrocław. “Collaboration with Wrocław University of Science and Technology and the WCSS will allow us to harness the real potential of heat generated by IT infrastructure and translate it into tangible environmental benefits for Wrocław's residents.”Like many countries in eastern and northern Europe, many homes and businesses in Poland are warmed using municipal district heating systems. By supplementing Wrocław’s network with heat from its university’s data center, both the municipal authorities and the higher education institution hope that the efficiency of the overall system will improve, reported Wrocławskie Fakty.Kogeneracja currently runs three combined heat and power plants in the Wrocław metropolitan area, according to its website, generating a combined 1,170MW of thermal power for the city.The Wrocław Networking and Supercomputing Centre has been in operation for 30 years and supports research projects in the fields of high-performance computing, data storage systems, and grid infrastructures. Similar proposals for district heating agreements are proving increasingly common as the data center market continues to expand in Poland.One of the latest examples is the offer by property developer Central Energy Group to use its 260MW data center to supplement the district heating network in the city of Konin, in central Poland, though local experts were reported to have been skeptical that the system needed such help.Learn more about the data center market in Poland and Eastern Europe, and meet with other executives and experts from the region at the DCN Warsaw event later this year.